Joy Brown Sculpture

It was such a special time in Japan with my teacher Shige, his wife and other apprentices. We are like family. As apprentices, not only did we learn how to make pots and build and fire kilns but we learned a way of life. I was his first apprentice 40 years ago! Working and living with Shige had a profound impact on my life. He is like a brother to me.

Moon Gallery is in a beautiful old renovated farmhouse up in the mountains near Nara. We walked up into the hills behind the gallery to pick flowers and greens for the opening of our show. It was wonderful to spend a couple days with everyone’s work. We all stayed in a nearby farmhouse and cooked and ate together, wonderful dinners, lots of sake and late nights talking. That’s Shige waiting for his coffee.. always inspiring and fun to be with him, always my teacher.

One of the wonderful things about traveling or being in another culture is you can expect the unexpected. In our days at work, there are often surprising things happening or showing up, usually much to our delight!

One time Tanya and I went back to our rooms after work and noticed that in all the other bedrooms, all the furniture pieces were wrapped in bubble wrap! We never figured that one out.

One day we noticed the cooks were all wearing big white aprons and dressed in white, kind of like pharmacists. They were spraying and wiping everything with what seemed to be bleach. We asked what was going on and it turned out there had been a report in the news about one case of someone dying from SAARS in Shanghai (city of 23 million)! (It seemed a little over reactive to me but what do I know!) After a day or so, the cooks were back in their usual clothes and no more bleach.

For days I heard this singing coming from around the corner of the workshop building. I thought it was the neighbors over the wall. But when I followed the sound it led me to this plastic flower in the bushes playing this song. A little bit like the first bars of “old man river…” over and over again, day in and day out! They told me it is a recording from a temple. Kind of soothing actually, all day long.

There is a lot of loud banging, grinding, welding, and dusty fumey HOT air in this workshop as there are a number of other projects going on along with my big ladies. They are building a 25 foot tall metal structure sculpture by a Belgium artist, by bending huge pieces of I beams and rods…not quiet! I am out there often in all that with my earplugs, though I’ve done most of my work on my pieces in the early morning or during their 2 hour siesta time.

Gratefully, there is a quiet small back room that is kept air-conditioned where a young newly hired art student, Xiao Wuu, is working on some projects in clay! We came to liking each other immediately and it has been my refuge to play with clay here. He teaches me Chinese words and I teach him English, all with a lot of laughs. Many of the guys, one by one, come back in here to cool off and joke around for a few minutes. Even the old guy who is doing the landscaping came in to sit down for awhile.

I’ve been making more pods, pods, pods. Woa xi huan niiba! (I love clay!)

Finding the eyes and mouth on a figure is one of my favorite parts of the whole process. It calls for a lot of concentration so I go to the workshop very early before anyone is there (they start at 7am), but after sunrise when the light is good and it’s still quiet and cool.

I cut black paper to a little smaller than the size of hole I think is right for the eyes. Then tape the paper eyes in place, moving them a millimeter this way or that. Getting them to look about right can take quite a while, even over a day or two, doing something else, coming back to look.

Once they’re in place, I trace the paper eyes and mouth onto the metal, remove the paper, then draw an inside line a couple of cm in. Then Pan Qiang drills a hole in the center of the eye shape and grinds out to the inside line. Then I erase the outside line and start to drill and file out the hole myself, taking my time, millimeter by millimeter, up and down the ladder a thousand times to look at the face from every angle, near and far.

The expression changes as I open up the hole, sometimes angry, goofy, alien, cross-eyed, sad… I talk to her, telling her it’s going to be all right. When it’s right the figure pops alive and she’s looking right at me from many angles.

When we were here in April after lunch many of the workers would come outside the kitchen and hang out in the warm sun on my big bronze reclining figure that was stored there under the eaves. There couldn’t be a bigger compliment! It made me realize how important it is to the piece for it to be placed where people can touch and sit on it.

Tanya took these great photos, sneaking around unbeknowst to the folks there.

This is Tanya.

To back up a little, I was here in April this year with Tanya Kukucka who is my dear friend and wonderful assistant. We built another big reclining lady in plaster. This big lady turned out larger than I had planned (I made a mistake in figuring the size!) which ended up being a great thing. She’s lovely.

Thanks to Richard Wanderman (http://www.richardsnotes.org) for putting this online journal up for me. It’s a huge help and I’m not sure it would come together without him!

I’m back in Shanghai again to finish three big ladies in bronze, two of which are the first in the editions. After the first day of feeling discombobulated, I’m enjoying the swing of things here. It’s that first day with jet lag and trying to tune in to what I have going here that’s always the hardest. And the heat! A week or so ago was the hottest weather in Shanghai in 150 years, 107 in the workshop everyday. Happy to miss that heat wave but it was 100 degrees today! Everyone seems pretty comfortable with it except me. It’s great to see my buddies again.

The rest are photos out my bedroom window. The workshop moved last year to Fengxian area, south west part of Shanghai, predominately agricultural area with many small industies (like this one) cropping up. A large and light filled workshop and living place. Very good working and living conditions here.

The shapes look wonderful to me, full and rounded. But it is very difficult to really see the surfaces now because of the newly worked shiny places next to the dark areas. The figures are cast in a number of parts which are welded together. All those seams have to be ground down and blended with the original textures. It can be difficult to make in metal a texture that is like the one we made in plaster.

My heart sinks when I see the big ladies at this point but I have been through this many times before and I know not to get freaked out about how bad the surfaces look right now! Each little issue, one by one, gets worked on until it is solved. Slowly the piece moves from being a big piece of metal (as it looks to me now!) to holding and revealing it’s spirit more and more fully. This is my challenge for the next 10 days here. After the initial shock, I’m feeling happy and excited to be here, working on these babies!

I’ve been thinking about my father a lot while I am here, here in the land of his birth. I wish I knew him then. He would have loved that I am working here, making my sculpture.

My grandparents came in 1908 and 1910 as missionaries, met here and married. My father was born in 1915 in Xuzhou, the city where my grandparents lived for about 40 years. We communicate instantly now with email and telephone. Back then it took months for a letter to arrive in the US announcing his birth.
(This photo is of:)
(2-1jpg) my father as a baby with a group of Chinese neighbors (I presume.)

Xuzhou in 1922. Now it’s a city of about 9 million people.

(Thomson sisters) my grandmother (on the right) and her sister who started a school for women in Xuzhou in 1910. It is now an outstanding high school.

(12-3) in a motor bike, said to be the first in Xuzhou. My grandfather was active in designing the road system in Xuzhou; some of the roads are still main highways now.

My father loved China and the Chinese people and returned to live in Xuzhou after medical school in the US with his young family. They left in the late 40’s when the communists took over.